ocking spirit, against a background of wild rocks. It represents
not alone the soul-phase of the later Renaissance, but of every
individual and of every civilization which on life's dangerous and
orgiastic substratum has reared a mere garden of delight. Living
hearts throb to the music penned by the dead hand of Mozart and of
Beethoven; the clownings of Aristophanes arouse laughter in our
music halls; Euripides is as subtle and world-weary as any modern;
the philosophies of Parminides and Heraclitus are recrudescent in that
of Bergson; and Plato discusses higher space under a different name.

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: BEAUTY

The second characteristic of works of genius is their indifference
to all man-made moral standards. They are beyond all that goes by
the name of good and evil, in that the two are used indifferently
for the furtherance of a purely aesthetic end. The Beyond-man
discovers beauty in the abyss, and ugliness in mere worldly rectitude.
Leonardo painted the Medusa head, with its charnel pallor and its
crown of writhing snakes, no less lovingly than the sweet-tender
face of the Christ of the Cenacolo, and the beauty is not less,
though of an opposite sort. Shakespeare's most profound sayings and
most magical poetry are as often as not put in the mouths of his
villains and his clowns. To genius, pain is purgation; ugliness,
beauty in disturbance. It injects the acid of irony into success,
and distils the attar of felicity from failure. It teaches that the
blows of fate are aimed, not at us, but at our fetters; that death
is swallowed up in victory, that the Hound of Heaven is none other
than the Love of God.

Though genius rebels at our moralities, it always submits itself to
beauty. Emerson says, "Goethe and Carlyle, and perhaps Novalis, have
an undisguised dislike or contempt for common virtue standing on
common principles. Meantime they are dear lovers, steadfast
maintainers of the pure, ideal morality. But they worship it as the
highest beauty, their love is artistic." And so it is throughout the
whole hierarchy of men of genius. "Beauty is Truth: Truth, Beauty,"
is the motto which guides their far-faring feet, as they lead us
wheresoever they will. With Victor Hugo, we follow, undisgusted,
through the sewers of old Paris: his sense of beauty disinfects them
for us. With Balzac and Tolstoy we gaze unrevolted upon the
nethermost depths of human depravity, discerning moral beauty even
there; while with